With Russia banning adoptions by Americans, Russell Moore, dean of the School of Theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, talks with Religion News Service reporter Adelle M. Banks about his advocacy of adoption by evangelicals. Moore has five adopted children, two of them from a Russian orphanage:
Q: You have written on a range of pop culture, political and social issues, so why have you made adoption — and specifically Christian adoption — your big cause?
A: My wife and I went through several years of infertility and miscarriages and found ourselves going through the process of adoption and we felt very much alone. So I started to write about the issue of adoption really to address people who are in the same situation that we were, which is not understanding and seeing the meaning of that rich metaphor of adoption in Scripture, not understanding how adoption makes a real family.
Q: What do you see as the biblical metaphor of adoption?
A: Scripture says that Christians have been adopted into the family of God, and so regardless of background, regardless of past, everyone who is in Christ is part of the family.
Q: You are living this out — how many children have you and your wife adopted?
A: We have five children. We adopted our first two from an orphanage in Russia; they were a year old at the time, and they’re now 11 years old.
Q: What’s the greatest benefit of being an adoptive parent?
A: The adopting of our two sons demonstrated to us something of the love of God for us and gave us a relationship that we never would have found on our own. We love our sons and they’ve brought so much to our family that we never could have planned out ahead of time.
Q: And the greatest challenge?
A: The greatest challenge is confronting the idea that there’s somehow a difference between adopted children and biological children in terms of affection, in terms of the structure of the family, which is not true. There’s no such thing as adopted children. There are only children who were adopted. In a biblical understanding, “adopted” is a past-tense verb, not an adjective. So once someone has been adopted into the family, that person is part of the family with everything that that means.
Read the whole interview here: http://www.religionnews.com/2012/12/31/russell-moore-why-adoption-is-a-pro-life-policy-for-evangelicals/
